On August 13, 2019, Daniele Antonioli from SUTD, Singapore, Dr. Nils Ole Tippenhauer, CISPA, Germany and Prof. Kasper Rasmussen, University of Oxford, England published a paper as part of the proceedings at USENIX 2019 entitled, “The KNOB is Broken: Exploiting Low Entropy in the Encryption Key Negotiation of Bluetooth BR/EDR.”
This paper identifies a vulnerability in the Bluetooth® Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) specification and was reported to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG)1. Intel helped facilitate the coordinated disclosure of this vulnerability in conjunction with the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI) and CERT/CC. Cert/CC issued CVE-2019-9506 for this vulnerability.
This is a vulnerability in the Bluetooth BR/EDR specification and potentially affects all Bluetooth BR/EDR devices adhering to that specification. Operating system providers and open source software projects have made mitigations available for this vulnerability. For more information on those mitigations, contact your operating system provider. This vulnerability does not affect Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth® LE) devices.
In all cases, Intel recommends that components participating in a secure Bluetooth connection (including Bluetooth Controller, Bluetooth Host and Profiles/Services) employ the highest level of encryption possible. You can find more information in the white paper.
Intel strongly believes in the value of coordinated disclosure, and is thankful for the opportunity to have helped facilitate disclosure of this issue with the community at large. As a best practice, we continue to encourage everyone to keep their systems up-to-date.
Footnotes:
- The Bluetooth® word mark and logos are registered trademarks owned by Bluetooth SIG, Inc. and any use of such marks by Intel Corporation is under license.
Software Security Guidance Home | Advisory Guidance | Technical Documentation | Best Practices | Resources